Southwest Airlines were forced to cancel 17 flights and delay hundreds more across the country due to the glitch. We are now managing flight delays across our system.
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Making matters worse, Southwest couldn’t update flight information, meaning travelers who called ahead arrived at the airport not knowing what they were walking into.
Technical difficulties led to some long lines and delays for travelers flying Southwest Airlines Wednesday, including those at Sky Harbor.
“We are aware and investigating current issues with our systems”, Southwest said in a statement on their website.
“We expect to continue our move toward a normal operation but believe it will take time”, it added.
As of 1:30 p.m., Southwest’s systems at Sky Harbor were coming back online and lines were moving quickly, airport spokeswoman Julie Rodriguez said via e-mail.
On Twitter, the company said they will offer “flexible accommodations” for rebooking travel and apologized for the outage.
For about three hours, visitors to Southwest.com couldn’t buy tickets, check in for flights, or check their flight’s status.
Industry consultants say the impact of computer disruptions will keep growing as airlines automate an increasing chunk of operations, distribute boarding passes on smartphones and outfit their planes with Wifi.
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Airlines have sprawling, overlapping and complicated technology systems, and even brief outages can cause thousands of passengers to be stranded for hours. United Airlines and American Airlines both had computer problems last summer but fixed the problems within a day.
